What miracles of economy would be performed in that stone-flagged kitchen, many of them by Mamma's own hands! Suddenly Maria Angelina found a moment to wonder afresh at that mother . . . and with a new vision. . . . For Mamma had come from this profusion.
"They have a regular place at Newport." Ruth was concluding some unheard speech behind her. "But they like this better. . . . This is the life," and with a just faintly discernible note of proprietorship in her air she was off down the stairs.
"Didn't they find Newport rather chilly?" murmured the girl to whom she had been talking. "Wasn't Mrs. M. a Smith or a Brown-Jones or something----?"
"It was something in butterine," said another guest negligently and swore, softly and intensely, at a shoulder strap. "Oh, _damn_ the thing! . . . Well--flop if you want to. I've got nothing to hide."
"You know why girls hide their ears, don't you?" said the other voice, and the second girl flung wearily back, "Oh, so they can have something to show their husbands--I heard that in my cradle!"
"It _is_ rather old," its sponsor acknowledged wittily, and the pair went clattering on.
Had America, Maria Angelina wondered, been like this in her mother's youth? Was it from such speeches that her mother had turned, in helplessness or distaste, to the delicate implications, the finished innuendo of the Italian world?
Or had times changed? Were these girls truly different from their mothers? Was it a new society?
That was it, she concluded, and she, in her old-world seclusion, was of another era from these assured ones. . . . Again, for a moment the doubt of her capacity to cope with these times assailed her, but only for a moment, for next instant she caught Johnny Byrd's upturned glance from the floor below and in its flash of admiration, as unstinted as a sun bath, her confidence drew reanimation.
Later, she found that same warmth in other men's eyes and in the eagerness with which they kept cutting in.
That cutting in, itself, was strange to her. It filled her with a terrifying perspective of what would happen if she were _not_ cut in upon--if she were left to gyrate endlessly in the arms of some luckless one, eternally stuck. . . .
At home, at a ball, she knew that there were fixed dances, and programs, in which engagements were jotted definitely down, and at each dance's end a girl was returned respectfully to her chaperon where the next partner called for her. Often she had scanned Lucia's scrawled programs for the names there.